Noctis Point - Edits

I've been doing a lot of editing recently. Noctis Point, the book I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo, is finished; I wrote the last chapter in the first week or so of January. I didn't want to shelve this for forever before I started editing, partly because I need to justify not working full-time right now, but mainly because I want to see Noctis Point published.

I've finished the first round of edits; general sense, continuity, consistency. And I tore through it in about a week and a half. That's pretty fast, for me. My wife was kind enough to print it out, and I did the edits in pencil. Sure makes you feel like a 'real writer' when you're sat in a coffee shop with a folder containing your writing.

I transcribed those edits into the Scrivener file. (Scrivener is brilliant, and I use it for anything longer than a piece of flash fiction. It's just a nice program to write in, more than anything, but it's got some lovely organisational touches that appeal to my love of over-filing things!) With another printout in hand, I'm now going through the next stage of edits: Reading it out loud.

Sue and I share books at bedtime. We've been reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (lists, polyps and tubercules); We did The Player Of Games, which I've just realised we mostly finished early last year... 20,000 Leagues has taken forever. We've done The Hobbit too. But reading Noctis Point out loud is a uniquely embarrassing experience, in a weird way. I want to do it, but every time I do I find a dozen things wrong with every chapter that I've missed out. It's extremely useful, no doubt aboutit, and I know that what Sue says will be insightful and useful. But it's still something that I need to get used to: baring my work, in a potentially unfinished state, to the world. Because later this year, as soon as possible in fact, I'm going to be looking for ways to get it published.

So far, it's going well.